The elaborate Chinese standard histories, which, if all translated, would fill several hundred thick volumes, provide illuminating information about many aspects of economic history. In this paper, I shall present a passage that enables us to estimate the gold stock of the Chinese at the beginning of the Christian era, a type of information rarely available.

In his History of the Former Han Dynasty, Ban Gu (writing about A.D. 80) has occasion to illustrate the stinginess of a usurping emperor, Wang Mang, and enumerates his wealth as follows:

At this time [A.D. 23], in the inner apartments of the Wei-yang Palace, ten thousand catties of actual gold were put into one chest and there still remained sixty chests. In each office for storage of the Yellow Gate and of the Intendant of Palace Parks and in the workshops of the Master of Recipes, there were also several chests. The Imperial Treasury at the Ch'ang-lo Palace and the Bureau of Equalization and Standards in the capital in addition stored very much cash, silk, pearls, jade, and valuables.

The Federal Tariff of 1901 marked the first of numerous interventions by the Australian government designed to stimulate the production of finished motor vehicles. It was unsuccessful, as was the “Tudor” Tariff of 1911, which imposed a specific duty on body imports; war conditions in 1917 led to an embargo on imports of motor vehicles. Thereafter, the government's need for revenue, which favored protectionist measures generally, in combination with a defense policy that deemed engine production to be of strategic importance, underpinned a series of government measures intended to promote local vehicle production. One effect of the “Green” Tariff in 1920, which afforded protection to manufacturing in general, was to attract American assemblers. By that time, the fierce and often clandestine clash of pressure groups representing special interests, within government, and within the motor industry (broadly defined to include local suppliers of components and equipment, from tires to electrical fittings), had become an important influence on policy. In several instances, the effects were both perverse and hilarious. A fragmented and inefficient industry operated within effective tariff protection, of which the principal beneficiaries were American multinationals. The “complete car project” of the 1930s was a failure, though it was revived under wartime conditions in the 1940s. With subsidies in mind, the government persuaded reluctant American and British producers to submit plans for full car manufacture, the first to do so being GM-H, the Australian subsidiary of General Motors (incorporating Holdens, the, long-established local body manufacturer).

At a time when serious questions in economic history are often delivered by publishers into the hands of either misinformed polemicists (such as Dinesh D'Souza in his remarkably misleading The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno–Affluence) or facile pundits (such as Jeffrey Madrick in his thoughtful yet under-researched The End of Affluence), it is a special pleasure to encounter Gordon Bjork's The Way It Worked and Why It Won't. Here is a work, skillfully rendered by the Lovelace Professor of Economics of Claremont McKenna College and the Drucker School of Management (Claremont Graduate School), that carefully assays the recent economic history of the United States with a view toward understanding the productivity slowdown that has obtained since the 1970s.

Torn between divergent disciples, economic history needs to prove its usefulness as well as its scholarly virtuosity. Innovations in method and data have carried the field forward, but perhaps not fulfilled the claims of their champions. To economics in particular, economic history contributes a richer sense of space and time, and the importance of demographic factors. Three vignettes attempt to illustrate that useful economic history can result from confrontations of past and present that improve our understanding of both. Finally, emerging developments in the underlying fields may herald a more central future role for our discipline.

All historians tell stories. Some rely on explicit narrative; others, on the narrative implicit in their analytic framework. Professor Henry J. Perkinson prefers explicit narrative, and for good reason. At his best he is very good at it. His pocket examinations of Anglo-American political and economic history are often perceptive and always quite delightful. Overall his stories are of decline—the decline in our understanding of knowing after Plato, the decline in Anglo-American governance after Lincoln, the decline in the free market after Adam Smith, and the decline in moral behavior after Rousseau. Now, I have nothing against stories of decline. Still, there is something quite bothersome in Perkinson's narratives. My bother begins with his hero, Karl Popper, and his treatment of that hero. Popper understood that human reason is fallible, as Perkinson asserts, but more importantly, Popper attempted to define “science,” to demarcate it from other human activities. In so doing, Popper asserted that knowledge does not come from the identification of correct ideas either by confirmation through experience or experiment, or by relation to foundational principles. For him both are logically impossible. Rather knowledge comes from the falsification of a factual proposition logically deduced from a stated hypothesis.

Ten years ago Maris Vinovskis published an influential essay that signaled a profound shift in Civil War scholarship.This dissertation was completed in September 1999 in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota under the direction of Russell R. Menard and Steven Ruggles. Financial support was provided by a fellowship from the University of Minnesota Graduate School. Although thousands of books and articles had been written about the military experiences of Civil War participants, Vinovskis contended that relatively little was known about their actual lives. Vinovskis called explicit attention to the demographic cost of the war and its continuing influence on the life course of the Civil War generation. An estimated 618,222 military deaths occurred during the war—roughly equal to the number of deaths suffered in all other American wars through the Korean War combined. The human cost of the Civil War becomes even more spectacular when one considers the rate of death. Nearly one in eight white men of military age died during the war, exceeding the rate of death in World War II by a factor of six, and the rate of death in the Vietnam War by a factor of 65.Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians.”

We study labor earnings inequality during the Great Depression using establishment-level information from the Census of Manufactures (COM). Inequality, as measured by the interquartile range in earnings per worker, declines by 10 log points between 1929 and 1933. However, by 1935, this difference has recovered to its 1929 level. In a decomposition, this decline and then rise in inequality is entirely explained by returns to observable factors, most notably the skill premium and regional differentials. The exit of establishments plays an important role in the initial decline in inequality but barely any role in the recovery.